Author
Topic: Formatting your posts (Read 2405 times)

Always cut the top of your posts at an angle so that... wait... wrong "posts"

OK, I'm talking about making posts here on the forums.

I suspect many folks simply use the "Quit Reply" box that appears at the bottom of most threads. It's conveniently in sight. Period. That's about its only advantage. It offers absolutely zero formatting options. Most of us know the basic Bold, Italic and maybe the Underlining 'tags'. "b" for Bold, "i" for Italic and "u" for Underline. Of course, all 'tags' are enclosed by square brackets: "[" and "]". Those are just about as easy to type as clicking on a button. 'cept, there ain't no buttons in the Quick Reply editor...

So, unless you have some others memorized or use a text expanding app of some kind, I highly recommend using the 'Full' editor. This lets you easily access all the formatting controls available in this nice forum software. It really is quite simple and powerful. And it's free!

You'll probably not use some of the controls very often. You may never use some of them... ever! But there are some very important controls that may prevent others from making miztakes!

One of these important controls is the "Code" button/format. It does have a label that appears when you hover your mouse over the button, but there are 26 buttons on the page (not counting three Font button: Face, Size, and Color pop-downs)! All the buttons have an icon and most are fairly obvious, the "Code" button, not so much. Its icon is the "#" character. I suppose that character was chose because that is used to signify a 'comment' in several programming languages. Of course, if you've never used any of those languages, the connection is rather opaque!

Opaque or not, this is one of the most important formatting options available. Its basic function is to prevent your browser from breaking a line of text just because it might be longer than your window is wide. If your window is not wide enough to show the entire line of text, it will cause a horizontal scroll bar to appear at the bottom of the 'code'. Here is a piece of fake code formatted with the 'code' tags to show you what I mean:

Now is the time for all good men to jump over the lazy fox and land feet first in the mud without ruffling his hair even without wearing a hat or a whole can of hair-spray in the process as shown in this image <img href="www.MyIncredibleJump.tiff" title="A man jumping over 100 feet of mud in which a fox is laying" size=100%>So, why would anyone (else) write such a line? Perhaps they have a particularly useful script that can be entered into a Terminal window! In that environment, 'spaces' are extremely important. Leave one out and you can completely change the results of the script. If you simply copy what is displayed when the "code" tags are used, your browser will break the line at any 'space' character it wants, based on the width of your window. If your text is as long as my example, it may be difficult to copy it completely without losing one (or more) of the all important 'space' characters!

The solution is very simple!

1. Click the "Code" button2. Paste in the script text between the two 'tags'

Bottom line: Open the 'full' editor sometime and simply 'play' with the buttons and see what they do. You may be surprised at how easy it is to make your posts a bit more understandable and pleaseing to the eye and our (my?) frustrations! And if your text was a Terminal 'command', you'll sleep better knowing you may have helped prevent a disaster.

[table][tr][td][b]Name[/b][/td][td][b]Age[/b][/td][/tr][tr][td]John[/td][td]65[/td][/tr][tr][td]Gitte[/td][td]40[/td][/tr][tr][td]Sussie[/td][td]19[/td][/tr][/table]The result is:

Name

Age

John

65

Gitte

40

Sussie

19

So if you really want to be expressive with BBCodes - you definitely have a lot of formatting resources to work with!

Cheers, Edouard

P.S. I had to tweak the example slightly because our forum software doesn't support table header tags.P.P.S. They also mention a Youtube tag on the website, but that isn't supported by our forum software either.

[li][/li] for each item. Just press 'return' at the end of each item. NOTE: This only works for un-numbered lists. Of course, you can always type in any kind of numbering system you want. One of my favorites is: